Category: media

Disney is expected to close its animation studios in Orlando this week, cutting loose 260 workers. “Under pressure to reduce overhead and consolidate production, Disney already has shuttered animation studios in Paris and Tokyo. In all, the studio has cut more than 700 jobs in recent years — including 50 animators in Orlando last year — and trimmed animators’ salaries as much as 50 percent. The most recent cuts would leave Disney’s animation division with a core staff of 600 to 700.”

TV screens have become cluttered with information. “Multiple screens have moved quickly into the arts and entertainment. Film and television screens crammed with text and images are everywhere from the Museum of Modern Art to “Access Hollywood.” Once we were couch potatoes, but we are all active viewers now, flipping the remote through channels, flipping our eyes around the screen. Even deciding to ignore the crawl requires an active choice.”

The costs of making big blockbuster movies is getting unsustainable. “Typically, the music will be almost incessant and costs several million dollars. The norm for a blockbuster is $US100 million and going up every year. The studios can no longer afford them but must go on making them. More and more they swallow their pride and split costs with a rival studio. Massive German tax shelter money has kept them afloat for the past several years, but is running out.”

It’s easier now to get films made because of digital technology and falling costs for production. But “African-American directors still find it difficult to get financing for independent black films that don’t feature, say, Will Smith picking a gunfight on a freeway during rush hour. Obtaining theatrical distribution is an even greater challenge.”

A new book about Miramax studios and Harvey Weinstein chronicles the commercialization of independent film. The book “shows how Mr. Weinstein led greedy studio execs down a path paved with profits, promising and doling out Oscars with the help of megabucks publicity campaigns—and in the process, independent films became as commercialized as studio films.”

The strange saga of Atom Egoyan’s controversial film, Ararat, continues apace in Turkey. “Turkish newspapers were reporting yesterday that the Istanbul-based distributor of [the film] is in contact with associates of a right-wing nationalist group that forced the distributor this week to postpone Ararat’s screening in Turkey.” Officially, the Turkish government is still allowing the film to be screened, but plans for its debut were scrapped this week in the wake of violent threats from the nationalists. Egoyan considered traveling to Turkey himself, to make the case for his film, but has scrapped the idea as “foolish.”

A new CD technology which creates a fuller, more ambient sound for the listener is being hailed as the technology that could reverse the slide in international record sales. Super-Audio CDs (SACD) have two different layers of music embedded in them: one for “normal” CD players, and one for players equipped with the special digital capabilities that unleash layers of music previously unheard of in digital media. For audiophiles, its the best development in recording technology since the vinyl record. For the rest of the world, even the “normal” CD layer is a vast improvement over the current standard.

Australian-made TV dramas have been failing at an alarming rate. “So what went wrong? Have viewers stopped watching Australian drama? Or weren’t any of these series good enough? Has reality TV altered the landscape to such an extent that people no longer have an appetite for scripted drama? And, if so, is it just a cyclical thing, or is it the shape of the future?”

Some groups of digital movie pirates aren’t in it for the money. “Insiders and piracy experts say the groups are motivated mainly by ego. Instead of cash, the online underground is powered by bartering — admission to these elite circles is granted only to those with something valuable to offer, such as computer parts or a pre-release copy of a DVD.”

“Archos’s device, which costs about $500 to $900 depending on the model, ignores an anticopying code found on a majority of prerecorded DVDs. That means consumers can plug the Archos device into a DVD player and transfer a movie to it. Users also can transfer recorded TV programs and digital music files to the Archos device. The Archos uses a video compression standard called MPEG-4 to cram as many as 320 hours of video at near-DVD quality onto its hard drive, the company says — the equivalent of 160 two-hour movies.”